free (NULL)

[Peter da Silva]

In article <17486:Jun611:18:1690 at stealth.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd at stealth.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
> C'mon, Peter, this is the third time you've just left out the third part
> of my paragraph.

Perhaps I misunderstood what you were talking about, but it didn't seem to
contain any useful information. You have certainly missed *my* point...

> It's perfectly fine to keep allocated memory around
> between calls, and even pass up a pointer to that memory, *provided*
> that the pointer isn't *defined* by your interface as a pointer to
> *allocated* memory. In other words, you must provide an unreadline() to
> free the memory.

That's what I don't agree with. It's perfectly fine to have a routine return
malloc-ed memory, so long as it's defined as returning allocated memory.

You're saying that you need to have an explicit destructor matching any
constructor.

It may be desirable to do this for certain interfaces, but making it a
hard and fast rule that you have to do this makes about as much sense as
banning functions with side effects.

[ in question:
strdup(s) char *s; 
{ 
	char *t = malloc(strlen(s)+1); 
	if(t) strcpy(t, s); 
	return t; 
}
]

> This is a mistake, because the pointer is *defined* by the interface as
> a pointer to *allocated* memory. Either the parent should malloc() and
> strcpy(), or strdup() should also have an unstrdup() to free the memory.

Not at all. If you have code that's full of:

	if(foocopy = malloc(strlen(foo)+1))
		strcpy(foocopy, foo);

Why not declutter your code with:

	foocopy = strdup(foo);

Yes, you can clutter things up again with strfree(), but now you have to
treat strings allocated with strdup differently from strings explicitly
malloced (say with:

	if(buf = malloc(strlen(path) + strlen(fname) + 2))
		sprintf(buf, "%s/%s", path, fname);

or the equivalent), and so on.

And are you going to require that none of these new objects are ever returned
from another function?

> To put it differently: Never, ever, ever pass internally malloc()ed
> memory up to your parent (this is what I said)---but, as always in C,
> feel free to apply the as-if rule.

To put it differently: it's usually a good idea to build creator/destructor
functions for objects, but there is no need to make it a hard and fast rule.

And I don't think Boyd said anything differently.
-- 
`-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180.  <peter at ficc.ferranti.com>
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